A new longitudinal study has found that teenagers raised by parents who rely on strict, punitive discipline with little warmth tend to hold more enduring antisocial beliefs, and may later experience rises in anxiety and depression. Researchers from Syracuse University analysed 491 US adolescents across four survey waves conducted between late 2021 and mid-2023 to explore how authoritarian parenting and young people’s thinking and emotions develop over time.
Authoritarian parenting is characterised by rigid rules, high control, verbal hostility and punishments delivered without explanation, paired with very little warmth. Prior work has linked this punitive approach to both internalising problems such as anxiety and depression, and externalising behaviours like aggression and delinquency.
Most studies of disruptive youth development have focused on actions rather than the beliefs that precede them. The study’s focus was antisocial thinking—beliefs, attitudes and values that sanction breaking rules, defying authority and aggression in peer conflicts. Social information processing theory suggests these beliefs shape how youngsters interpret social situations, increasing the likelihood of perceiving hostility in others and responding aggressively.
“Much of the work on antisocial behavior focuses on identifying and addressing behavior that has already emerged,” said Wusirige, a PhD candidate in the Department of Human Development and Family Science at Syracuse University, in discussing the research. “That work is essential, but once harmful behavior occurs, consequences for adolescents and others may already have followed. We wanted to look further upstream at antisocial thinking – the beliefs and attitudes that can make aggression or rule-breaking seem acceptable. Understanding these cognitive precursors may create opportunities for prevention while adolescents develop their values and social judgments.”
The team sought to determine whether authoritarian parenting was linked to these thinking patterns and how such beliefs relate to adolescents’ emotional lives, including whether beliefs justifying aggression co-occur with anxiety and depression, and whether difficulties in one area forecast others over time.
The study analysed data from 491 adolescents and their parents from a US-based longitudinal project on bias-based harassment. Families completed four survey waves roughly six months apart from November 2021 to the summer of 2023. Teenagers reported on anxiety, depression and antisocial thinking across Waves 2 to 4, while parents completed a 12-item questionnaire on authoritarian parenting at Wave 1. The researchers used a random-intercept cross-lagged panel model to separate stable between-person differences from within-person fluctuations over time.
At the between-person level, adolescents whose parents relied more on harsh, unreasoned discipline tended to exhibit consistently stronger antisocial beliefs than peers with less authoritarian parents. By contrast, between-person associations between authoritarian parenting and average levels of anxiety or depression were not statistically significant.
Within-person analyses told a different story. Baseline authoritarian parenting was not linked to wave-to-wave shifts in antisocial thinking, nor to changes in anxiety or depression at the second or third waves. Around 18 months after the initial parenting assessment, earlier authoritarian parenting was positively associated with within-person increases in both anxiety and depression, with the link to depression hovering at the threshold of statistical significance.
“The between-person link with antisocial thinking suggests that when rules are enforced through threats rather than explanation, teenagers may not internalise the moral rationale behind social norms,” the authors wrote. They offered two possible explanations for the delayed within-person rise in distress: chronic stress from parental hostility may gradually erode coping resources until symptoms emerge, or the spacing of the survey waves may have influenced when the link became detectable.
“One takeaway is that the absence of immediate difficulties does not necessarily mean there will be no difficulties later,” Wusirige explained. “For parents, these findings highlight the value of consistently using warmth, explanation, and constructive guidance, even when a teenager seems to be doing well, rather than waiting for visible problems to emerge.”
Across the three youth outcomes, stable between-person levels of anxiety, depression and antisocial thinking were positively correlated. However, within-person analyses did not reveal cross-lagged links among the three outcomes, suggesting the co-occurrence may reflect shared, stable vulnerabilities rather than short-term developmental cascades.
Gender differences did not reach statistical significance for any pathway, indicating the observed patterns may operate similarly for boys and girls, though researchers cautioned that more nuanced differences could emerge in different contexts or developmental stages.
The study aligns with earlier research linking strict, punitive parenting to anxiety and depression, though that prior work focused on maternal discipline and daughters specifically, while the current analysis examined a broader authoritarian parenting style without identifying gender differences.
Researchers emphasised that the study shows associations rather than causation. Parenting was measured only at baseline, and the authors note that parent–child dynamics can be bidirectional. With more fathers participating and a wider range of caregivers, future work could better map how parenting styles relate to adolescent adjustment across diverse family structures.
The authors also pointed out that the sample consisted of cisgender, heterosexual youths in the United States with a biological parent respondent, which may limit generalisability to sexual and gender minority youth or other caregiving arrangements. They suggest future research could test whether programmes promoting reasoning-based discipline help prevents entrenched antisocial attitudes and later emotional distress.
“We should distinguish antisocial thinking from actual behaviour,” Wusirige emphasised. “Endorsing beliefs that justify aggression or rule-breaking does not mean that an adolescent will necessarily act on them. Our interest in these thinking patterns is about identifying opportunities for earlier prevention, rather than labeling adolescents or treating their futures as predetermined.”
The study, “Longitudinal associations between authoritarian parenting and adolescent antisocial thinking, depression, and anxiety: Between- and within-person effects,” was authored by Wusirige, Bo Jian and Gabriel J. Merrin.
